Russian scientists from the Archeology and Ethnography Institute of the Siberian department of the Russian Academy of Sciences have found a mysterious burial in the Siberian barrow of the Bronze Age.

      The grave, which is about 3500 years old, was harbouring remains of buried men and women embracing each other. Tens of skeletons lying face to face and holding each others’ hands have remained there. Some scientists had an impression that the remains are imitating sexual intercourse.

      Archeological excavations covered about 600 graves in the Old Tartas village in the Novosibirsk Region. It is the first time scientists are facing such arrangement of skeletons and hope to solve the riddle with the help of DNA analysis.

      Meanwhile, expecting tests results, archeologists have put some hypotheses forward. According to some of them the burials belong to Andronian culture, which was embracing Siberia in the second millennium B.C. It was in that culture that the model of burying a woman with her husband after his death started to take place. Some specialists assume the couples were buried together on purpose: when the man died, a young woman was sacrificed to perform the role of his wife in the other world. Therefore the couples’ bodies were put in such a way so that to symbolize sexual intercourse.